Life

by Gwyneth Jones

  Frank was entertained by their babbling: “Tell us what reductionism means, again,” he suggested. She got on with Frank. He

  didn’t interrupt.

  “Well, reductionism is when you explain things in terms of simple components. Could I have your Rubik’s cube?” Frank handed the toy down from its shelf. Anna swiveled the puzzle into chaos and then deftly returned it order. “See. The blocks of color are the units and I’ve reduced them to order. Now we say the puzzle’s solved, and we’re happy, but it’s just an interpretation. You could arrange the tiles, or any units of any system, into their maximum state of complexity. That would be order too.”

  Frank was cooking a free-range omelet, for himself not for them. He never did anything for anybody else. That was the secret of a happy life, he said. Please yourself. He dribbled green virgin olive oil into one of his burnished skillets and watched Anna over his shoulder.

  “Stand on yer head again. I like it when you stand on yer head.”

  Anna crouched, dropped her rosy brown brow onto her cupped hands and rose, feet to the ceiling, neatly perpendicular: luckily her knickers were clean. The parrot squawked “AMAZING!”

  “She’s full of surprises, your girlfriend,” said Frank approvingly.

  “She’s full of drink and drugs. I’m going to have to take her to bed.”

  Having Ramone in the squat had turned out better than Spence had expected, because she’d taken up with Frank. Mr Frank N Furter, though you wouldn’t think so to look at him, was quite the ladies’ man. He’d run through several girlfriends in the short time that Spence had known him, each of them startlingly pretty, hip, and well turned out. His liaison with Ramone was inexplicable, unless he saw her as another exotic animal for the collection. Ramone herself—Spence suspected—drew a blank on sexual choice. She was someone who would nurse deliberately hopeless passions, remaining indifferent to the way her actual body was passed around. Anyway, his host and the wild girl were an item, in an offhand, impersonal way: and Spence was grateful. Between her duties as Frank’s paramour, the novel she was writing, and the hours she spent closeted with Alice Flynn playing soulful ballads, she didn’t have much time to harass Spence. Though she had her moments. Once they were walking uptown in the middle of the afternoon, eating tomatoes they’d fetched from the allotment, when she stepped back against a shop window, dropped to her haunches, and fumbled blatantly under her skirts. A pungent stream of liquid came trickling across the hot, filthy sidewalk slabs. The passers-by paid no attention, but Spence was outraged.

  “What’s the matter?” demanded Ramone, catching up and grinning at his distress. “I was only taking a piss. Is it my fault there are no public toilets? Men do that all the time.”

  “I have never pissed in the street in my life,” snapped Spence. “I don’t know what right you have to inflict that exhibitionist stuff on me.”

  She used to do it on campus, she’d said she was marking her territory, but at least she’d wait ’til after dark. She looked up at him malignly, more than ever like a cross between Gollum and Mr Toad when dressed as a washer-woman. She had taken to wearing contact lenses. Ramone’s eyes were an unusual shade of blue: opaque, greenish, like dark turquoise. Sounded good, but on her it made you think of river mud. “Yeah, but you do other things, you dirty dog. I tell you what, Spence, I’ll trade you. Your male duties for my womanly privileges. Anytime.”

  She was so openly hostile towards his relationship with Anna that he wondered if the fake Sapphic story was a double blind. The constant soft ache of arousal in his groin made him speculate, was Anna that way inclined? Was he expected to do it with both of them? But the terms of the pact were clear, he was safe. Aside from her dirty habits, and ensuring he’d spend the next several years of his life plagued by phantom lines from Dusty Springfield lyrics, Ramone could do him no harm. She was even looking better, he noted. There was still a tang of body odor and unhygienic underwear in her vicinity, but the mass of hair was more artistically disheveled and the hippie clothing almost stylish, in an abandoned way. Frank was probably treating her better than any sexual partner she’d ever had. He was good to his pets. Spence, the American Tourist in the menagerie, ought to know.

  At first he’d wondered how Anna had known that their bargain would turn out so well. Spence had had his reasons. What had made her so sure? He realized that she’d known nothing. She had identified the most likely of her male friends (her best male friend, he flattered himself) and taken a calculated risk, armed with no more than her noble nature and her faith in physiology. He feared for his beloved: steel true, blade straight. He sensed within her rigor such a fragile and vulnerable spirit. He wanted to protect her from the cruel world.

  It was an extraordinary time. It had to end.

  Anna liked dressing for him after work, in the staff toilet cubicle at the restaurant: the orange skirt with splashes of scarlet and a clinging white tee-shirt; the fringed green and gold sarong worn short to her thighs; her favorite, the lavender sundress. White cotton knickers, a bra that fitted without any repulsive underwire. Everything reminded her of his hands: the smell of his ejaculate always lingering on her body, despite the kitchen odors. Thoughts of things they had done together bathed her in delicious heat. She checked herself in the drizzled mirror, is this still Anna? She disliked the idea of they all saying to each other behind her back, look what sex has done for our prim scientist! But you can’t prevent that sort of thing. They say, let them say. She and Daz met Spence and they went to a bar, where they would meet maybe Wol and Rosey, who were living in a huge Victorian flat borrowed from a rock star, Simon Gough, Ramone, Flynn, some of the weirdos from Regis Passage. Then she was Anna, the quiet one, taking no active part in the conversation, unless she forgot herself and started explaining something until her victim glazed over; while he was Spence, with his charming American accent, deadpan witticisms, the smile with which he savored English turns of phrase, laughter that creased the corners of his grey eyes, and a sneaky detachment from that eternal male hierarchy. You couldn’t rank Spence; he wasn’t one of the chiefs, but he wasn’t one of the Indians either. She liked that.

  Eventually these sophisticates would deign to proceed to a club, into a wash of sound, bodies, darkness, laser light. It was so good to dance. Faces beamed at them, brimming with chemically induced sweetness. It would be harsh to call the mood false, when the added chemicals couldn’t do anything if the brain’s own resources didn’t leap to greet them, like lovers meeting. God bless the drug. God bless the pressures and forces of all the billions of years that built us to be so capable of joy. She and Spence, however, preferred their own inner glow, afraid chemicals might flatten the libido. They would vanish into the anonymous crowd, groping each other insatiably.

  Ramone was very angry about Anna’s fall from single grace. She maintained that sex with a man was feeble and contemptible. Lesbian love-making was incomparably more valuable and more profound. When Anna pointed out that Ramone was at present fucking a male and shamelessly patriarchal drug-dealer geezer at least twice her age, Ramone said: that’s different. I’m not doing Frank for fun. I’m collecting life experience. When Anna said why couldn’t Ramone find herself an educational dyke-geezer girlfriend, Ramone curled her chimpanzee lip.

  “You don’t know how tough it is, being a feminist and a lesbian. Practically all the women on the scene put the same moves on you as if they were men. I’m not going to swallow their shit. Lesbianism could be brilliant. Unfortunately it’s a pathetic joke, a poor imitation of the male supremacist world like everything else women do.”

  Privately Anna wondered, could making love to a woman be so different? When she held Spence, wild with pleasure, gasping and trembling in her arms, as he begged her to suck more fiercely on his nipples, as she rubbed at his perineum, slid her fingers into his slippery rectum and kneaded the soft concavity where his testes, when he was in this mood, so easily slipped back behind the pubic bone, what was different then? She had heard
that women are better partners because men are not multiorgasmic. Spence often seemed to reach peak after peak, in a cascade as extended as her own, before the final climax… Must be because he was so young. Of course there was his prick, which she would not want to be without. When they were in his room at Regis Passage she loved to lie naked, spine arched, heels under her and knees spread, and masturbate while Spence did the same. She kept her eyes closed so she would not know when, overcome by the sight of her cunt, he would fall, clutching her shoulders, and plunge his prick inside. She loved the moment when her whole body went into spasm, locking and seizing, madly pumping. It was like a merging of human and machine, without the paranoia of that idea; it was the pleasure of tennis and yoga glorified, pure movement in power, the delight of becoming completely physical. To be a machine is lovely. And everything else—the way the dance floors grew empty and uncertain in the early hours, the hot grubby sands, the smell of suntan oil, the wine they drank, the street sounds, the glittering sea that rocked at the end of every street and caught her body in its cool invigorating embrace in the late afternoons—all these were the adjuncts of this summer, which she would have possessed anyway, if she had settled for the pain and deceit of the kind of boyfriend-girlfriend affairs a nice girl was supposed to have, without ever knowing what was missing from the center: this rapture of a young animal, pure appetite without shame, without anxiety. She thanked the light of reason in her prayers. They said it couldn’t be done. But Anna had made up her mind to tackle sex in a fair and straightforward way, and things had turned out just fine.

  She understood how Spence felt about Rob and Daz. Daz Avritivendam was fabulously beautiful and intelligent and lovely in many ways, but nothing unconventional could survive in her vicinity. Daz and Rob were a couple, a transformation as obvious as a physical metamorphosis, and it grated. Anna had kept her distance from this coupledom, not because of Spence, but for her own reasons. She tried not to know it when the lovebirds started to fall out. But one day, after a London weekend that had obviously been a disaster, Daz asked Anna to come back to the house after the lunch session at work, instead of joining the others. As soon as she’d shut the door of their room behind them, she collapsed in tears.

  “Daz! What’s the matter?”

  “It’s Rob.”

  “You’ve had a fight?”

  “I have to get away from him. Anna, you have to help me, please.”

  She wept on Anna’s shoulder. She had to get away from Rob because she couldn’t marry him. She’d seen this happen to Muslim girls from home, stumbling blindly into relationships that couldn’t survive. Daz was a Hindu, and her family so detached from all that religious-ethnic power stuff she’d thought she was safe. She’d been wrong.

  “I can’t marry him, it would be impossible. I must get away, right away, right now.”

  Anna did her best to comfort the World’s Most Gorgeous Malaysian. She asked no questions; she didn’t need to. She suspected she’d soon know more than she wanted to be told, anyway. She agreed that they would put their savings together, and instead of staying in Bournemouth making money all summer, she would go away with Daz.

  Needs must.

  Daz calmed down and revealed, ingenuously, plans already devised. They would go to Greece, there were some very cheap flights. They would bum around the islands. There remained something so tragic in her hollow cheeks and compressed lips that Anna knew she had no choice. It was probably better this way. Quit while you’re ahead.

  “But what about you and Spence?” asked Daz, when she knew she was safe.

  “It’s okay,” said Anna. “It was a temporary thing.”

  They left on the last day in July, driven to Gatwick by Daz’s mother. Anna and Spence had said goodbye the night before, in the pub on the corner of the Passage. It served them right, that they had to part in public, after the stuff they’d got up to.

  In the kitchen at Regis Passage late that night, under a pokerwork wall plaque that read DON’T GET MAD GET SORTED, Frank N Furter shook his head over the folly of the young. “Should’er told her how you feel, Spence. Should’er taken a chance. The key is always frank. Remember that. As you go through life, you will find I’m right.”

  “Yeah, well. It’s too late now.”

  He would go back to school, bury himself in his studies, use his new expertise to find another girl who would never lead him such a dance. He would try to forget.

  “Fancy a line?”

  “Thanks. Don’t mind if I do.”

  Anna Anaconda

  i

  When Anna was a little girl, she and her sister possessed a picture book about a snake called Anna Anaconda, who swallowed things: notably other animals. It was a reign of terror. The anaconda lured and flattered every animal in the forest to its doom, except for the peacock, whose beauty was impervious to flattery and immune to greed. (The book was indifferent to conventional zoology: this was a female, Amazonian peacock.) Finally the peacock tricked the monster into trying to swallow her reflection in the river. She went on swallowing until she burst, and all her victims escaped. Anna had gained immense, sensual satisfaction from the picture of the snake trying to engulf the whole of the great Amazon: flanks swollen and transparent, so you could see the huge variety of things and creatures she’d already consumed. But she had equally admired the cool-headed bird. There’s a growing grace and glory in remaining by myself, sang the peacock, to the annoyance of her neighbors. But solitary content turned out to be the right choice—a rare conclusion for a children’s story. The book had frayed, disintegrated, and vanished. In Anna’s memory the two characters had survived, the distinction between them fading. The snake who swallowed everything was not a monster. She desired, like the peacock, to be self-contained. She tried to gulp her own reflection not because she was tricked, or greedy, but because she longed for closure.

  Anna remembered Anna Anaconda in her second year at university, as she drifted into social isolation. She shared a house with Daz and Rob Fowler (their relationship had recovered after the abortion and the summer break, though the old suburban certainty never returned); Simon Gough; a sociology student called Ray Driscoll, who had been another male member of first year’s they all; and a girl called Marnie Choy, live wire and fun fanatic, who had answered an advertisement they put up. One night in October, when Daz was in London for the weekend, Rob Fowler came and tapped on Anna’s bedroom door. She turned him down. Sexual attraction never dies, but it was no struggle.

  She worked. She was the Biols student who attended every lecture, studied every textbook, and possessed complete, immaculate notes that she freely shared. She was the one who enjoyed the hated, obligatory statistics course. She went out dancing, she stayed up late commiserating with other people’s troubles, she had a few nights of sex with Ray when he was between serious girlfriends. A transparent envelope stood around her. It was Anna’s extended self, her containment: the great river. When Marnie and Daz, arm in arm, screeched drunken girl-power challenges in the Union Bar: We want a man! Not one of you dickless lot, a real man, we want a man!, she laughed and cheered, but she was a million miles away. There’s a growing grace and glory in remaining by myself.

  In early June, on a bright cool summer’s day, she walked out of the campus valley to visit Spence’s sun terrace. There had been more rain this year. The turf was richer, the flowers more advanced. Some of the plants were hardly recognizable in habit as the above-ground processes from the same rootstocks as last June. She spent a long while on her knees, looking, examining, making sketches in her notebook.

  She thought of Spence. In that room in Regis Passage, with the ridiculous wiring and the terrible crack in one corner, which he monitored in felt-tip, he lay beside her on the mattress that smelled of flea-powder and cum. They were both dressed; they were not being sexual. He showed her a picture of his cat, a blue-eyed, black half-Siamese called Cesf, standing up on gangling back legs to bat a catnip mouse on a string. “It’s an old password I don
’t use anymore.” He missed Cesf, and worried about him. The cat was monogamous, didn’t get on with Spence’s Mom, and was reportedly pining. He missed his mother too, but didn’t carry her picture. He said, with a droll self-mocking reserve, “I can remember what she looks like.” Anna sensed something very different from the affection and mutual respect she shared with her own parents: Spence’s mother was a power over his whole life, future and past, his goddess not his government.

  She had realized, soon after the start of their idyll, that she could never, ever tell him about being “in love” with Rob Fowler. It would have been rude, like telling someone they’d been invited to dinner because your first choice of guest had canceled. Especially since it turned out he didn’t like Rob. Given the typical first-year’s emotional situation, Spence’d probably had an unrequited crush of his own, and he hadn’t said anything; but she’d felt compromised. Maybe it was because of that unease—something she needed to say, but must not—that she’d made no effort to get back in touch. He hadn’t contacted her either, which he easily could have done. Simon still heard from him.

  They had each made the same choice. It was the right ending.

  She set her sketches aside and opened a sheaf of printed lecture notes, minutely annotated. Eukaryotic Genetics: Genetic Constraints of Selection.

  At school, Anna had been thrilled by the certainty of the DNA process. It was such a trick, so satisfying and neat, the two complementary strands of bases, unzipping, acting as templates for replication: safe as the ticking of a watch. At school they let you think perfect replication was the norm—with the occasional dramatic derailment, so that new species could be born. When you got closer, you realized what happened was totally different. The process was weak, not strong. The strings of bases were continually being repaired, continually evading repair, the patterns snagging and dropping stitches, so it was amazing you woke up every morning and found that a rabbit stayed a rabbit and a rose a rose. Coherent change emerged, mysteriously, like new music, out of the constant noise of miscopying: sections stuffed in backwards, upside down, in totally the wrong place… How could this flux of meaningless chemical glitches drive the engine of something so powerful as evolution?